Questionnaire #7: With David Earl, Editor-in-Chief of The Watermark (2022-2023)

Question #1: Can you please introduce yourself a little and tell me how long you worked at The Watermark? How did you come to join the staff? 

1. My name is David Earl, I worked at The Watermark for two semesters, Fall 2022-Spring 2023. The previous editor-in-chief, Alexa Koch, was also my professor in a writing class. She mentioned the journal once offhandedly in class, I asked if I could be involved, and I was quite suddenly made editor-in-chief one day.

Question #2: What was the culture of the journal like at the time, to the best of your recollection? Feel free to include anecdotes or personal recollections as you like. 

1. I’m not sure if I could describe a “culture of the journal.” We were quite isolated; it was only two people, an editor and assistant editor. We both had no experience on this sort of thing and we were relatively isolated from the rest of the MassMedia department, apart from the Writ Large magazine at the time. In the short time I was there, I don’t know if I really was able to develop such a culture. The work felt hectic and the responsibility of handing creative work was much like any creative journal, but the whole time I felt more like I was trying to determine the culture from our archives and the regular contributors from previous journals.

Question #3: What was student engagement like during your time at The Watermark, as best you can remember, how many submissions on average did you get per issue? How many people worked together to produce an issue? 

1. As far as I can remember, we had on the order of 70 submissions for the single issue we produced. After Fall 2022, the plan was to publish only one issue per academic year. There were only two people on the editorial team.

Question #4: Do you have any memory of how many copies of each issue were made that you worked on? Some editors' notes say ‘This Volume had 4,000 copies made’ and others don’t track production rates. Even a rough guess would be super helpful. 

1. I do not remember exactly. I believe we had under a thousand copies made.

Question #4.5: How were copies you did print distributed on campus? 

1. We distributed copies on the newspaper stands throughout campus, these are also owned by the MassMedia. We did not have any distribution outside of campus; we asked people that were not part of the university to come pick up copies, either from a newsstand or from a stack of reserves left in the office. I did mail a copy of the magazine to a contributor that had moved away from Boston, which I did on my own dime. 

Question #5:  What was institutional support for The Watermark like in your time working at it? What did UMass-provided expertise, mentorship, and support look like?

1. Apart from our budget, there was not much support. Our advisor was very hands off (I believe he was quite busy) and provided little in the way of practical expertise or mentorship. I had a very brief tutorial on some basics of InDesign from the former editor in chief before she left the university. There were some general guidelines and instructions on process left by her as well. Apart from that, we had to figure most of it out ourselves.

Question #6: Some copies of The Watermark mention being able to buy copies online before the website went down. Do you recall if The Watermark had interest from people outside / off of UMass Boston’s Campus? Essentially, what was its reach? 

1. I was not even aware that online sales was something the Watermark used to do. There were a handful of contributors from outside the university, though I'm not sure if they were alumnus or just members of the community. That was the extent of its reach as far as I was aware. 

Question #7: While you worked at The Watermark, was there an institutional memory of its past? By that I mean did The Watermark have an archival memory of itself and how it related to predecessors like Howth Castle, or was it more future facing towards producing the next issues? 

1. There was maybe a hint of institutional memory. The website did have an extensive log of back issues, and there was a shelf full of old journals, including spinoffs and previous names like Howth’s Castle. There were also some anthology editions that collected material from previous issues. By the time I became editor-in-chief, however, I got very little sense of the continuity from present to past. There wasn’t anything resembling a design document (which is fine, it’s a student journal) or some sort of mission statement, etc. I did not really know what Howth’s Castle was and I had to root around myself to figure it out. And there unfortunately wasn’t much time to do any of this work because we had so many pieces to pick up to produce our own issue.